I knew that there are various Ruby patches available but I've never tried them
as I didn't want to waste time for something that I thought I don't really need.

Then I found out that rvm comes bundled with patches ready to be applied, so
I'm just a simple command line away from having a patched Ruby. Don't know
how I missed that before.

One particular patch that worth trying is falcon. It improves startup time of
big Ruby applications. And the bigger your Gemfile is the bigger the
improvement.

Try it right now for yourself. It will only take a couple of minutes.

First upgrade rvm to make sure you have the latest

rvm get head

Then the actual Ruby build

rvm install 1.9.3 --patch falcon -n falcon

Note that this command can fail with the following error: Patch 'falcon' not found.
The reason is that falcon patch is not yet supported on the latest Ruby
patch level, in which case you will need to specify older patch level to make
it work.